'On the Other Hand'

Contrarian Voices
By Antonio C. Abaya
Written on Jan. 23, 2008
For the Standard Today,
January 24 issue

This column is called 'On the Other Hand' because it is hospitable to serious opinions, aside from my own, that question or deviate from the conventional wisdom. And that includes opinions on current environmental issues.

Global warming and climate change have acquired such an infallible cachet of a Revealed Truth that we may have forgotten that there are serious reservations from serious thinkers who have contrarian views about the matter.

Reader Jun Valenzuela of Naga City referred me to the following website:

http://thereconstitutionrevolution.blogspot.com/2007/07/suvs-on-jupiter-warming-trend-solar.html.

The website belongs to one Paul Joseph Watson who claims (in Nov. 16, 2006) that global warming and the resultant climate change are not due to human activity i.e. the burning of fossil fuels – as the high priests and gurus of the New Religion claim – but are natural cyclical phenomena caused by the evolution of the Sun.

Watson cites data and reports in www.space.com that purportedly demonstrate that a) global warming is occurring in the thin atmosphere of the ex-Planet Pluto as it moves farther from the Sun on its long elliptical orbit; and b) that the Planet Jupiter is in the midst of global warming that can raise its surface temperature by 10 degrees F.

Watson also cites a report from the Current Science and Technology Center of the Museum of Science in Boston ( www.mos.org/cst) that the polar ice caps on Mars are melting, in much the same way that the polar ice caps on Earth are melting.

NASA, as cited by Watson, reports that its Cassini spacecraft detected on Nov. 9, 2006 a massive hurricane on the surface of Planet Saturn's south pole, nearly 5,000 miles across, which could be a sign of climate change on that planet. ( www.saturn.jpl.nasa.gov )

Global warming has also been detected on the Planet Neptune's largest moon, Triton, since 1989, according to astronomer James Elliot of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. ( www.scienceagogo.com )

Watson also cites an Associated Press report that solar radiation reaching the Earth is 0.036 percent warmer than it was in 1986, according to a study to be published in the Geophysical Research Letters journal.

Finally, Watson cites a London Telegraph report that purports to explain Global Warming: the Earth is getting hotter because the Sun is burning more brightly than at any time during the past 1,000 years. ( www.telegraph.co.uk ).

I do not know the academic and professional credentials of Paul Joseph Watson, but the scientific sources and journals he cites are impressive enough. The credentials of Zbigniew Jaworowski, MD, PhD, DSc., of Poland are even more impressive.

According to the bio-data attached to a paper that appeared in March 16, 2007 issue of the journal Science – forwarded to me by American environmentalist Alexandra York – Dr. J is a senior adviser at the Central Laboratory for Radiological Protection in Warsaw. In the winter of 1957-58, he measured the concentration of CO2 in the atmospheric air of Spitsbergen Island (Norway).

From 1972 to 1991, he investigated the history of the pollution of the global atmosphere, measuring the dust preserved in 17 glaciers: in the Tatra Mountains in Poland, in the Arctic, Antarctic, Alaska, Norway, the Alps, the Himalayas, the Ruwenzori Mountains in Uganda, and the Peruvian Andes.

Dr. J's paper is titled "CO2: The Greatest Scientific Scandal of Our Time" and is a counter-argument against the thesis personified by Al Gore, that CO2 – specifically CO2 generated by human activity – is to blame for global warming and climate change.

He argues that a more important greenhouse gas is water vapor naturally present in the atmosphere, which contributes some 95 percent in the total greenhouse effect. He claims that 97 percent of total CO2 is from natural emissions; human activities contribute only 3 percent.

As anyone who has watched Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth knows, his thesis is based on ice core samples extracted from a glacier in Antarctica which seem to show that CO2 levels from as far back as 650,000 years indicate low concentrations until the modern era, especially since the 1970s.

Dr. J, who knows about ice core samples, says ice cores cannot be regarded as closed systems, and that low pre-industrial CO2 concentrations are an artifact caused by more than 20 physical-chemical processes operating in situ. For example, according to Dr. J, in cold water, CO2 is 70 times more soluble than nitrogen, and more than 30 times more soluble than oxygen. Therefore, CO2 trapped in ice cores ages ago have long been dissolved in the surrounding ice and snow, and cannot be regarded as valid indications of CO2 levels in the past.

Dr. J also claims that environmentalists who point to ice core samples to prove their thesis, have deliberately ignored more than 90,000 direct measurements of CO2 in the atmosphere, carried out in America, Asia and Europe from 1812 to 1961, though the data were published in 175 technical papers.

The UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change regards the last 50 years as the warmest period in the past 1,500 years and blames this on the burning of fossil fuels. This monothematic line of reasoning, says Dr.J., does not take into account the astronomical evidence that these last 50 years had had the highest solar activity of the past several thousand years.

The new science of cosmo-climatology has documented, since 1961, a close relationship between solar activity and the surface temperature of the Earth. Later studies have shown that the main mechanism by which cosmic factors regulate our weather are cosmic rays penetrating the atmosphere.

Cosmic rays, says Dr.J, rule the climate by producing an ionization of air molecules at the rate required to have a measurable impact on clime. Ionization – the process by which electrons are stripped from or added to an atom's outer structure, making it more ready to combine with another ion – helps create condensation nuclei in the troposphere, the lowest region of the atmosphere.

During low solar activity, says Dr. J, more cosmic rays penetrates into the troposphere and more clouds are formed, which act as an umbrella to protect the Earth against solar radiation. Conversely, during periods of high solar activity, less cosmic rays penetrate into the troposphere and less clouds are formed, allowing more solar radiation to hit the Earth's surface.

(To which let me add that when I was in my teens, shortwave radio was one of my hobbies. I learned even then that solar flares, which come in 11-year cycles, disturb radio reception because the troposphere, against which radio waves bounce to allow them to go around the Earth, were affected by solar activity.)

"Human beings may be responsible for less than 0.01 degree C of warming during the last century. The hypothesis that the currently observed Modern Warming is a result of anthropogenic ('man-made') CO2, and of other greenhouse gas emissions, is a myth."

Can we believe all this? Dr. J's assertion that global warming and climate change are due largely to solar activity coincides uncannily with the independent observations culled by Paul Joseph Watson from different scientific sources, that global warming was/is also occurring in the planets Pluto, Jupiter, Mars, Neptune and Saturn. It does look much more than coincidental.

So should the world abandon all efforts to find energy sources other than oil? Of course, not. Whatever the truth or untruth about these contrarian views on global warming and climate change, I share the possibly politically incorrect sentiment expressed last month by, of all people, Republican presidential wannabe Mike Huckabee who said: "I look forward to the day when we can say to the Arabs 'You can keep your oil!'"

It would have sounded more emphatic with an expletive inserted. *****